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Treasures: Saying Goodbye Is Never Easy

Tina Dale has been the features editor for the Times Record since March 2001. She previously was a beat reporter for several years, covering Crawford County, agribusiness, health, education and Sebastian County courts. She has won awards for feature story, news and business coverage and humor column. Previously, she was an award-winning news producer for Channel 40/29 KHBS and a reporter for the Amarillo Globe News in Amarillo, Texas. Tina was named a Leading Lady by the Junior League of Fort Smith for 2007. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism and English from the Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and a master's degree in professional writing from the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Okla. She originally is from Wheeler, Texas.

I spent last weekend in Naples, Fla., a city that has become one of my favorites in the past few years.

I walked on the beach. I ate amazing fish. I took photos as the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. I even took a boat ride.

But for the first time in my life, I would have given anything not to have had to make that trip to Florida.

I’m a beach girl. Everyone who knows me and many who don’t know this. The beach is my happy place. It’s where I always want to be.

But last week, I put off packing until the very last minute.

I didn’t get to the airport in my super early fashion. In fact, by the time I checked in and got through security, it was basically time to board.

I didn’t anticipate when my zone was called and head directly for the line when it was. Instead, I was one of the last to get on the plane.

I didn’t want to make that trip.

I traveled to Naples last week to say goodbye to my mother-in-law. Doris Nightingale Scott died April 13, a month shy of her 90th birthday. Her memorial service was May 17.

I loved Doris the first moment I met her.

She was a beautiful, petite, perfect lady. She had such a lovely complexion, even in her late 80s, that all I could think was she was the perfect English rose.

She was also tough. She lost her fiancè in World War II, but she didn’t let her dreams of love die. Instead, she met Joe sometime after the war when he moved into her neighborhood. They married and together raised three sons.

She battled breast cancer and a very rare eye cancer that took her left eye.

She didn’t let it slow her down. She continued to golf and bowl with her friends just as she had done for so many years. She continued to travel and hike and enjoy her sons and their wives.

When the cancer came back in her ear last spring, she bravely decided she didn’t want to fight it anymore.

She merely said she was tired of the fight and would gracefully face the next chapter in her story.

She was gentle and strong, tiny and brave — beautiful in every since of the word.

She knew I was a journalist, and when we met, she had a stack of Naples newspapers telling the history of the city. We sat for hours on her back lanai as she told me all about the city that was her second home. (She grew up, married Joe and raised her children in Cleveland. The two bought their home in Naples in 1978.)

She accepted me into her home and her family without hesitation and loved me as quickly as I loved her.

So you see, saying goodbye was not something I wanted to do.

I’m so glad I made the trip though.

I sat there and listened to her sons tell their beautiful stories of their mother. I basically knew those stories, but it didn’t stop them from causing the tears to flow down my cheeks.

Then, I listened to her friends (who also gave so many hugs I thought might heal after all). I was charmed by their stories and the laughter that came with them and realized this woman was even more beautiful than I already knew.

“She was the perfect lady,” they all said.

“She didn’t even perspire. We’d get through playing golf, and all of us would look a mess. But not Doris. She would look perfect,” one friend quipped.

I could see that. Somehow I could see even when she was going through radiation and chemotherapy and her last few weeks in hospice that she probably did so looking the perfect lady.

On May 18, we took a ride out three miles off the coast and fulfilled Doris’ last wish — for her ashes to be sprinkled in the ocean. We each tossed a rose and said our own goodbyes.

On the ride back to shore, we met a group of dolphins. Some jumped and swam near us and then swam off, but for a good 10 minutes, a mother and her calf swam right in front of our boat in perfect choreography. It was a breathtaking sight — a mother caring for her young, the symbolism of which was not lost on a one of us.

I will never be the perfect lady. If I have to admit it, I even perspire. But every morning as I slip Doris’ ring on my finger, I will hope I can handle that day with the grace she taught by her example.